ABSTRACT
The history of Chinese lexicography can be traced back to nearly 1,900 years ago to Xu Shen’s 许慎 Shuowen Jiezi《说文解字》. Xu (131 ce) established a semantics-driven orthographybased framework for lexicography. He analyzed Chinese characters and found that component parts encoding semantic concepts, called bushou (部首 ‘radical’), can be used to identify and classify related characters. In Shuowen Jiezi, each Chinese character (an orthographic unit and an equivalent of a conventionalized sociological word in Chinese) is given an entry according to the radical it contains (and hence its conceptual classification). The entry contains a rough definition of its meaning, often in relation to the basic meaning of the radical; the character composition according to its components (bujian 部件); and very often also gives hint on its pronunciation. Although Erya《尔雅》is often claimed to be an even earlier collection of Chinese ‘words’ in different categories, it is important to note that Erya is a taxonomic collection of terms without linguistic information. Most crucially, the 540-radical system of Shuowen Jiezi has been adopted by all major Chinese dictionaries for nearly two millennia with adaptation and simplification. Indeed, we may conclude that Chinese lexicography started with and has been dominated by Shuowen Jiezi.
